A library of practical ideas for teachers from classroom games and activities to discipline and teacher improvement. Feel free to submit your own ideas.
If you have a large class of pre-school aged kids, for example 45 three-year-olds, you can have the problem that not only do the games that work with older ages not work, but neither do the ones that work with smaller classes. Do not despair! Rather than throwing away (more…)
Although movement and fun are two important elements you should try to put into every kindergarten English class, sometimes you will need sit down activities like these below to calm students down, regain discipline and/ or let the teacher get his or her energy back. These activities are also useful for kindergartens where the policy is not to allow too much (more…)
These ideas are designed to work with every kind of kindergarten class, including typical problem classes such as large classes, classes that can’t move around, mixed level classes, classes with very low level students, classes that study very little English and classes with short attention spans (more…)
As much as singing, moving around, chanting, colouring in etc are all vital parts of a pre-school English lesson that can take some getting used to if you haven’t taught very young learners before, sometimes the most intensive language practice can come from variations on games you play with your adult classes. The descriptions below are examples of adapting the old TEFL classic “20 Questions” (more…)
1. You can’t individually ask them their names and ages
If this is a problem because you actually want to know their names for purposes of classroom control etc (and it is great for that), the best solution is to ask someone to prepare name badges, preferably in roman script as well if it isn’t used in their (more…)
1. You are your hand
If there are problems with lack of space, noise, discipline and/ or potential breakages in the classroom with students running around, you can get them doing the usual action words for pre-school classes (more…)
The teaching of numbers in English is something that can start in the first class with two year olds and come up against their own development in maths and confusions with L1 all the way through school, and even then still be a challenge for an Advanced Financial English class to (more…)
1. Shorten
It is difficult for a native speaker to appreciate just how much the length of a text can make it difficult to understand due to factors like not being able to find the right information to answer a (more…)
Although a good EFL exam class teacher will break the students slowly into real exam practice and spend as much time boosting their confidence as showing them how challenging the exam will be, sooner or later the students are going to need a taste of the real thing. Setting your classes up as much like the real exam as possible could (more…)
1. Challenge each other
The best way to make students care about answering the questions correctly is to make those questions ones written by their classmates. Writing those questions to challenge the other teams (more…)
